Sun to Roll Out First of Niagara Servers

Updated: The new systems run on Sun's multicore UltraSPARC T1, which boasts high throughput with low power consumption.

Sun Microsystems Inc. on Tuesday unveiled the first systems to run on its new multicore UltraSPARC T1, which the company hopes will give it greater traction in sectors now dominated by x86 machines.
The rollout is a cornerstone of Suns fourth-quarter product announcements, being made in New York City. Sun officials have been talking about the processorwhich offers up to eight cores per chipfor more than a year and officially introduced it in November.
Sun also announced a host of programs around the processor, including the option of evaluating the server before buying it, and upgraded Sun N1 System Manager software that now supports the two new servers.

The chip (formerly code-named Niagara), with eight cores that can process four instruction threads simultaneously, is designed to offer greater performance than current single- or dual-core processors, but without ramping up energy consumption or heat generation. The UltraSPARC T1 has a 70-watt power envelope.

Sun officials refer to these capabilitieshigh throughput with low power consumptionas their "CoolThreads" technology.
Click here to read more about the UltraSPARC T1.
At the event, Sun Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy said the new UltraSPARC T1 is the latest step in Suns push to re-establish itself as a key server player, an initiative that includes the line of systems powered by Advanced Micro Devices Inc.s Opteron processor and the upcoming Advanced Product Line of systems, jointly developed with Fujitsu Ltd. and based on Fujitsus SPARC64 processor. Those systems are due to launch in mid-2006.

McNealy noted that for several years, Suns business was rapidly expanding. That ended with the economic downturn, when businesses began to look less for innovation and more toward costs.
"Commodity was in, innovation was out," McNealy said at the event. "All of a sudden, Dell was the cool shirt to wear. We got pretty clearly labeled as the dot in the dot-com bust. ... We do want to get fashionable again, and we do think well make that happen."
He said that will happen through partnerships with companies like AMD and Fujitsu, acquisitions like those of Afara Websystems Inc.which brought the basis for the UltraSPARC T1 chip to SunKealia Inc. and SeeBeyond Technology Inc., and innovation, including the new multicore architecture. He also said that with $4.5 billion in the bank, Sun isnt done acquiring companies to fill out its portfolio.
The two Sun Fire systems introduced Tuesday are both small rack-optimized servers. The Sun Fire T2000 is a 2U (3.5-inch) server with fully redundant and hot-plug components. That system, with pricing starting at $7,795, is shipping immediately. David Yen, executive vice president of Suns Scalable Systems Group, said in an interview before the event that the Santa Clara, Calif., company already has shipped more than 1,000 test systems to customers.
The T1000, a 1U (1.75-inch) system, will ship in March 2006. Pricing starts at $2,995.
Both systems will ship with chips with four, six or eight cores.
Peter Coffee takes a closer look at Suns Niagara server strategy. Click here to read his blog entry.
The systems are designed to run current Web workloads, an area dominated by small x86 systems. Yen said the new Sun Fires capabilities and pricing show that Sun, which before had focused primarily on its higher-end SPARC/Solaris platform, can compete with the x86 systems. The new Sun boxes perform better and cost less than comparable x86 systems, he said, and dont contribute to the energy and heat issues that quickly are becoming key data center issues.
"What it shows is that our costs are not really higher than x86 costs," Yen said. "[The servers] are not just a SPARC/Solaris play; they also are crossover products."
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